"Often cast as the peacemaker in free software disputes, Bruce Perens is on the warpath. When we caught up with him, he wasn't in a mood to be charitable to Novell. On Friday the Utah company, which markets the SuSE Linux distribution, revealed that it was entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Redmond would pay Novell an undisclosed sum in return for Novell recognizing Microsoft's intellectual property claims. Novell received a 'Covenant' promising that it wouldn't be sued by Microsoft."It's a case of 'Damn the people who write the software'", he told us. "Novell is in a desperate position - it has a smaller share of the market than Debian,"" he told The Register. Update: Novell responds to community's questions: here, here and here. Update 2: Havoc Pennington's take.

Microsoft has spent 20+ years employing various anti-competitive tactics.

Of course you would say that. You think all closed source software is unethical. But in fact, Microsoft has spent 20 years competing. And manyof their competitors shot themselves in the foot.

The classic anti-Microsoft lie is that poor old Netscape was wiped out because Microsft gave away IE ... when the truth is, Netscape stole Mosaic from the University of Illinois and gave it away for free to destroy all the companies that legally licensed the code from Spyglass (the designated company). And Microsoft won the browser war because IE 4 was better than Netscape 4 and Netscape 5 imploded and IE 5 was fantastic.